Grounding: Francis Weller and the Long Dark

The episode opens with a brief excerpt from Autumn’s conversation with Francis Weller, who describes this time as “the long dark.” Francis invites listeners to understand the long dark not as a brief crisis or temporary disruption, but as a generational passage. It may be decades before something like repair and restoration becomes visible.

The phrase also invites a transformed relationship with darkness itself. Francis describes the dark as a place of dreaming, stillness, quiet, patience, restraint, and hidden life. Below the ground, roots, microbes, mycelia, minerals, and underground networks sustain what later becomes visible.

Drawing on Susan Murphy’s phrase “a dark-adapted eye,” Francis invites us to learn how to see differently in this time. Rather than rushing toward action alone, he points toward a deeper listening: the kind of waiting that may allow something creative to emerge.

Nicole and Autumn return to this image throughout the episode: seeing in the dark, waiting in the dark, and trusting that something can be growing even when it is not yet visible.

Main Conversation

Friendship, Retreat, and Spiritual Leadership

Nicole begins by reflecting on Francis Weller’s teaching about friendship as essential medicine for spiritual leaders. She connects this to the work of The BTS Center: forming relationships of friendship, collegial camaraderie, honesty, and possibility among people seeking to respond faithfully to the climate crisis.

She then shares about a BTS Center retreat called Climate Advocacy and the Sacred Wild, which gathered senior leaders of faith and climate organizations. The retreat invited participants not to develop new projects, but to practice presence. The point was not to produce more work, but to deepen relationship with the natural world and with one another.

Nicole describes an evening activity using infrared flashlights to explore a garden in the dark. The flashlights revealed patterns in flowers that human eyes cannot normally see, but that birds and insects can. For Nicole, this became a vivid image of what it means to “see in the dark”: to recognize that other creatures already perceive realities that we are only beginning to learn how to notice.

Autumn connects the retreat to Francis Weller’s teaching about slowing down enough to cultivate intimacy, trust, and maturity. She names a shift from leadership as generating new ideas or initiating new projects toward leadership as spiritual maturation.

Who Do We Choose to Be?

Nicole names Margaret Wheatley’s question, “Who do we choose to be?” as a guiding thread in the work of The BTS Center. In Wheatley’s writing, the emphasis is not simply on doing more, but on becoming the people this time requires.

Autumn connects this to Francis Weller’s invitation to cultivate the skill of being: the restraint of presence, the willingness to wait, and the spiritual maturity to remain with what is unfolding without immediately turning it into a project.

In a climate-changed world, the question is not only, “What should we do?” It is also, “Who are we becoming?” and “What kind of freedom are we practicing now?”

Receiving Wisdom With Humility and Care

Autumn and Nicole then explore how spiritual leaders relate to wisdom traditions beyond their own direct lineage.

Autumn reflects on Francis Weller as an older white man who intentionally draws on multiple wisdom traditions, including Indigenous traditions, while naming them rather than claiming them as his own. She connects this to Norma Wong’s earlier invitation to think of indigeneity not only as an identity, but as a way of being that many people need to recover in their own places and lineages.

Nicole brings in Brian McLaren’s Life After Doom, especially his challenge to Christian leaders to reread their own scriptures with fresh eyes. McLaren invites Christians to acknowledge how deeply empire has shaped inherited readings of the Bible and to recover the text as an Indigenous and ecological text.

Together, Autumn and Nicole hold the tension of receiving wisdom with gratitude, intention, humility, and care. They do not resolve the complexity, but they name it as part of the work: learning how to receive what is needed for this moment without appropriation, possession, or erasure.

Fugitive Practice

Autumn then shares more about her current writing on fugitive practice, which is rooted in Black liberation, Black feminist thought, and the historical figure of the fugitive.

She explains that a fugitive is someone who has escaped from a place and is in hiding. In the context of enslavement, the fugitive is one who says, against all evidence to the contrary: I do not belong here. I am free.

Autumn describes fugitivity as a spiritual and political practice of becoming fugitive from supremacy systems of separation, categorization, domination, and individualism. It means refusing to participate in the way those systems expect us to participate. It means reclaiming agency over one’s body, one’s response, and one’s freedom.

For Autumn, fugitive practice is not only about escaping. It is about remembering that freedom is not merely something we do. Freedom is something we are. It requires practice to remember that we are free, even inside systems that tell us we are not.

Freedom for Future Generations

Nicole and Autumn then connect fugitive practice to the long dark. If this is a generations-long passage, then the work we do now may not be on behalf of our own immediate freedom alone. It may be for people we will never meet.

Autumn names this as one of the gifts of the fugitive orientation: it places us inside a much larger timeline. We are part of a bigger story of freedom. We may be working for the freedom of future generations whose lives unfold beyond the horizon of our own.

Rather than making the work feel less meaningful, Autumn says this perspective can be freeing. It helps her do what she can do without becoming frozen by the fear that nothing matters.

Next Steps

Autumn and Nicole offer several grounded practices for listeners who want to carry the conversation into daily life.

Name the hazards and gifts in your place

Begin with Francis Weller’s questions:

• What are the actual hazards in your place?
• What gifts do you and your communities carry that could be brought to bear when crisis comes?

Be both imaginative and specific. Hazards might include flooding, heat, wildfire smoke, housing instability, isolation, power outages, food insecurity, or strained community relationships. Gifts might include neighbors who check in, people who cook, organizers, storytellers, drivers, gardeners, elders, children, musicians, ritual leaders, or people who know how to listen.

Ask who your friends are

Francis’ question is just as important:

Who are your friends? Who are the people with whom you can practice slowing down, telling the truth, and holding one another in love? Who can notice when you are slipping into survival mode? Who can help you remember your freedom?

Cultivate a relationship with the imaginal

Francis offers a simple practice for engaging imagination and the imaginal realm.

Lie down. Cover your eyes with a towel or cloth. Begin with a simple image, such as moving down the trunk of a tree. Then, as Carl Jung advised, let go and let be. Do not direct what happens next. Allow the image to unfold.

Francis describes this as a source of renewal and support for his work in the world.

Practice rest

Francis names rest as a rebellious practice in a culture driven by productivity. Rest can be a way of stepping out of the mania of capitalism and into receptivity.

Ask: What is soul saying to me now? What is the soul of the world saying through the symptoms of these times?

Gather a listening circle

Autumn invites listeners to gather three to five people: friends, neighbors, or members of a faith community.

Take an hour or two. Turn off your phones. Sit together. Take turns naming one thing in your life or in the world that is weighing on your heart. Allow space for silence, especially when you run out of things to say.

You do not need to solve anything. Practice being present and holding one another with attention.

Measure the gathering only by whether each person has been heard once.

Use shared quiet as a leadership tool

Nicole offers a practice for facilitators, clergy, organizers, teachers, and community leaders: use two or three minutes of shared quiet.

Try it at the beginning of a meeting, during a transition, or before closing. Nicole suggests introducing it simply: “We are going to spend some time in shared quiet.”

Two minutes may feel short to some and long to others. Either way, shared quiet can change the texture of a room and help a group slow down together.

Additional Resources

Francis Weller
Psychotherapist, writer, teacher, and soul activist whose work centers grief, ritual, soul work, and community.
https://www.francisweller.net/

Margaret Wheatley — Who Do We Choose To Be?
A key influence on The BTS Center’s work around leadership, collapse, community, and becoming the people this time requires.
https://margaretwheatley.com/books/who-do-we-choose-to-be/

Brian McLaren — Life After Doom
A book that invites spiritual leaders to face ecological and civilizational realities with courage, wisdom, grief, and love.
https://brianmclaren.net/lad/

Center for Spirituality in Nature
A partner in the Climate Advocacy and the Sacred Wild retreat, offering programs and practices for deepening spirituality through nature.
https://www.centerforspiritualityinnature.org/

Lament with Earth
A BTS Center series of online gatherings weaving music, ritual, art, scripture, and collective lament.
https://thebtscenter.org/lamentwithearth

Season 2 of Climate Changed
Autumn and Nicole invite listeners to revisit Season 2, which explores creativity, imagination, and collaboration as climate practice.
https://climatechangedpodcast.org/

The BTS Center
https://thebtscenter.org/

Connect with us

• Climate Changed Podcast:
  https://climatechangedpodcast.org/
• The BTS Center:
  https://thebtscenter.org/
• Email: podcast@thebtscenter.org
• Find transcripts, discussion guides, full-length video episodes, and bonus materials on The BTS Center’s YouTube channel.

Blessing:

May you lean into the long dark
knowing that you are not alone.

You, Climate Changed listener,
are part of a community of friends who care.

Together, let us grieve.
Together, let us imagine.

For it is indeed a blessing
to be alive right now.

Meet Our Guest

Francis Weller is a psychotherapist, writer, teacher, and soul activist. For decades, he has guided individuals and communities through grief ritual, soul-centered psychotherapy, and practices of communal healing. His work weaves together psychology, mythology, ritual, poetry, Indigenous wisdom, and deep attention to the living world.

He is the author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation, and In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty.

Meet Our Host

Autumn Brown (she/her) is an artist, facilitator, mother, and theologian. The front woman of the eponymously named soul-pop band, AUTUMN, she is a queer, mixed-race Black woman, a gifted facilitator and orator, and a freedom worker who grounds her approach to building movements for liberation in her belief in the innate capacity for healing that emanates from the human heart.

Meet Our Co-Host

Rev. Nicole Diroff (she/her) is ordained in the United Church of Christ. She holds expertise in facilitation, data management, and strategic planning. Nicole is a certified Maine Master Naturalist, serves as Chair of the Spiritual Formation Committee at Williston-Immanuel United Church and is Co-Chair of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Committee for the Scarborough Public School District.

Meet Our Producer

After spending 17 years and over $30,000 on three continents attempting to “de-gay” himself through conversion therapy, Peterson Toscano came out a quirky queer Quaker concerned with human rights. He also produces other podcasts including Citizens Climate Radio, Bubble & Squeak, and the Bible Bash Podcast. Peterson has been featured in People Magazine, The Times of London, the Trya Banks Show, and NPR Morning Edition. He lives in Pretoria, South Africa with his husband, Glen Retief.